Central Debian translation statistics

These pages show the number of packages in Debian that are ready to be
translated, and how many are actually translated.

Be aware that this process is only a part of internationalization
(which is abbreviated into i18n because there is 18 letters
between the "i" and the "n") and localization (or l10n). i18n
sets up the globalization framework, and l10n adds a specific "flesh"
for each language and country into this framework. That's why the
tasks to do for l10n depend on the achieved i18n. For example, if
your i18n only allows you to change the text of a message, l10n
merely means translating this text. If the i18n allows you to
change the way the date is printed, you may express the way to do
that in your part of the world. If the i18n allows you to change the
character encoding, l10n is the act of setting the character
encoding you need for a given language. Please note that character
encoding support, including multibyte, doublewidth, combining,
bi-direction, and so on, is a prerequisite for all other part of
i18n and l10n, including translation, for some (mainly
non-European) languages.

l10n and i18n are tied, but the difficulties related to each of them
are very different. It's not
really difficult to allow the program to change the text to display based
on user settings, but it is very time consuming to actually translate
the messages. On the other hand, setting the character encoding is trivial,
but adapting the code to use several character encodings is a
really hard problem.